u/WorldWarRon

It’s that time of year you will be receiving a statement regarding the calculated value of your property, in the eyes of the assessor.

I receive mine last week and decided to take a look at recent sales prices. Being that all houses, even in the same neighborhood, are not equal, I took some square footage calculations and found out my neighborhood’s most recent sales averaged $165 per square foot. My valuation came in at $290 per square foot (YIKES).

This is the part where I decided to call the number on the valuation statement to see if there was a mistake or some set of data I may be missing. I was transferred over to the assessor who referred me to the city of Duluth Sales Book for last year (valuations are about 1 year behind), which may account for some of the discrepancy but I don’t recall a market correction.

Anyway, I dig into the sales book and find some pretty high-priced houses being sold. The book is transparent enough to also provide square foot of the house. Great! Now I can do some algebra and find answers. I do find that my price per square foot isn’t terribly off (+11%), but now I’m wondering what happened to price per square foot over the year and this is where I find something interesting.

Out of the 30+ properties sold in my neighborhood, 23 of them had their square footage understated, artificially increasing the price per square foot valuation. The average $ per square foot increased $46 due to this understatement, resulting in much higher valuations